The Family by the Rock

“Tugged by the lever of imagination, the shroud of history 

lifts like a misty fog fleeing the light of the early day.”

By Patrick J. Walsh

As I walk through the park on a chilly day, I realize: this land has been here a very long time, but we have a very short memory.

On this day, as I pass the familiar landmarks that I see every day that I walk in the park, I cannot help but imagine some larger, mystic setting surrounding the commonplace. This tendency toward the concoction of an elaborate daydream is largely the result of my recently having read (or more accurately, re-read) John Steinbeck’s short novel The Pearl.

A heartbreaking story of a Native American couple pursuing a better life for their infant son, The Pearl is remarkable for its vivid descriptions of a time and place and people that had already been displaced by the time Steinbeck wrote the novel in the 1930s.

Seeing things

Today, when concern about that time and place and people seems ever further distant, there remains the basic desire of good people everywhere who want to make things better for those to come, by honoring all the good that has gone before. And as I walk in the park today, that simple truth, combined with what little we know of the history of those who lived here long ago, has got me seeing things.

There is an outcropping of rock near the area that is now defined as the entrance to the park, and there are large rocks scattered around that area. Alongside one particular boulder whose shape and texture somehow make it seem the proper setting for a story, I linger a moment, and wonder...

photo © Patrick J. Walsh

The land has been here a very long time...

•   •   •

Tugged by the lever of imagination, the shroud of history lifts like a misty fog fleeing the light of the early day. A short distance from the rock, in the open field nearby, a wise old shaman works the round end of a stone against the recessed innards of a well worn bowl, grinding a paste of Jewelweed for the treatment of one of his elderly convalescents. He is concerned with the health of the spirit, and the body.

Closer by the rock, a fire burns. A different sort of vessel is perched over the flames; it is the source of nourishment for the family, and the center of activity for the family’s interaction with the larger community. It is tended by a woman - a mother; she is concerned with the happiness of her family, and with their sustenance.

As the morning passes, the father of the family by the rock joins his fellows on a hunting expedition; he will return with meat for the stew.

Female relations and neighbors lead the older children on an excursion to find herbs and vegetables in the surrounding woodlands, and as they return, flavors are added to the olio in the pot, under the watchful eye of the mother who oversees the mix, and tends the fire.

Building a meal

The process of building the stew is similar to the building of the community. A little one ventures shyly toward the matron at the hearth-place, proffering some green shoots that her own mother has given her for her neighbor’s meal.

Smiling reassuringly, the mother of the family by the rock shows the neighbor child how to separate the useful parts of the plant from the dregs, and lets her toss the herb into the pot. Delighted with her part in the grown-up ritual, the little girl runs off toward home, chuckling with glee.

On special occasions - a feast of joy, or a marking of sorrow - the adding to the soup is a more formal rite. Visiting together in small groups or sporadically stopping by to express congratulations or support or condolence, the friends of the family by the rock each bring something for the cauldron, and all sample the produce of the fire. Their presents, and their presence, add flavor and body to a meal designed to provide sustenance, and to convey solidarity.

•   •   •

Then, as quickly as the veil was lifted, some small distraction in the park catches my attention, and the rich scene arisen before my eyes fades again into the enfolding grasp of time long past.

I resume my walk, and I wonder how much of my imagining might have been real. I know the kernel of the thing is true, since we do have some small knowledge of how others lived, long ago; and it feeds my romantic outlook to wonder if perhaps there really was such a life going on, by the rock, or over there by the children’s playset, or near the nearby picnic area, or perhaps where the parking lot is now.

However close or far off I might be, one way or another, it gives me some small comfort to think of the family by the rock, gathered around the dinner fire, their friends stopping by with gifts for the meal that they will all then share.

And as I walk on in the park on a chilly day, I cannot help but smile at the simplicity of the vision, while I think of the simple idea: see the fire, add something to the soup.

The land has been here a very long time, but we have a very short memory.

© Patrick J. Walsh

The Walk in the Park series:

• Soliloquy in Gray

• A Greeting of Flowers

• Trails in the Woods

• The Men

• The Hawk

• The First Warm Day of Spring

• Encounter in Autumn

• A Walk Beneath the Dripline

• A Walk in the Park

Images of Neil Armstrong, 1930-2012

By Patrick J. Walsh

As I reflect on the life and death of Neil Armstrong, I realize that my most compelling perceptions of him as an American hero have as much to do with how he lived in the 30-plus years before and the 43 years after he became the first human being to walk on the Moon as they do with that iconic moment itself.

The image of a young boy in love with the idea of flight, open to all the possibilities and challenges of a uniquely American future in an era when life was not easy here or around the world — that is how I imagine the young Neil Armstrong.

My vision is informed by reading and research, touched by fascination with the individual and the times as they are presented in historical documents, and imbued with the personal knowledge of others who shared that phase of life at that particular time in history.

Then there is the image of a man so in love with the idea of service and community and the quiet dignity of the American ideal of helping others, however and wherever we might find ourselves.

Approaching middle age as an anointed hero of epic proportion, he was presented suddenly with unprecedented opportunities of celebrity and wealth and public adulation. Given his status as a sort of super civil servant, he chose the ideal over the advantage, electing to pursue a quiet, dignified life as an instructor of others who might well further those ideals in the course of future generations.

Neil Armstrong during preparations for Apollo 11 in 1969.

NASA photo.

Through knowledge, through inference, by study and by intuition, in knowing of his deeds and hearing and seeing him speak on those rare occasions when this modest, decent man felt it appropriate to do so, I have felt privileged to embrace Neil Armstrong as a personal hero — an individual concerned with bettering the lives of others through dedication, service and the pursuit and sharing of knowledge and wisdom.

As his remarkable life now passes in its entirety into history, I hope he will be known and celebrated for all these reasons, as well as for those moments in that halcyon summer of 1969 when he landed on and walked on the surface of the Moon.

I will think of him when I look up into the night sky, knowing the significance of what he did there, and I will remember him for the ideas and ideals that marked his life before and after that extraordinary evening, while he lived out his life in the service of others here on Earth.

© Patrick J. Walsh

Check out these episodes of Pat’s video series “Five Minutes in Space” that celebrate important moments from the amazing life and career of Neil Armstrong:

• Five Minutes in Space #11: The X-15 - Testing the Edge of Space 

(http://youtu.be/p5I5Bd0J5ts)

• Five Minutes in Space #3: Gemini 8 - At The Edge

(http://youtu.be/weQEPXK6yyI)

• Five Minutes in Space #19: Apollo 11 - A Defining Moment

(http://youtu.be/ICpT58HMsgc)

Recalling the flight of Friendship 7: John Glenn would triumph...

by Patrick J. Walsh

When John Glenn rode his Friendship 7 Mercury space capsule into orbit on February 20, 1962, he elevated the U.S. space effort onto an even par with the manned space program of the country’s superpower rival, the Soviet Union. His flight was celebrated for the achievement it represented for the astronaut and for the space agency that had made it possible, and as a victory for the United States in the nation’s Cold War competition with the Soviets.

With the benefit of hindsight on the fiftieth anniversary of the event, it is easy to celebrate the significance of Glenn’s Friendship 7 odyssey while missing the intensity of the drama that accompanied it. There was, for example, the urgency expressed by the American media and felt by the American public that pressured NASA to achieve an orbital mission after two sub-orbital Mercury flights, during a period when the Soviets had already achieved two piloted trips in orbit. Similarly, there was an implication -- often made explicit by the Soviet political leadership -- that falling behind in the ‘space race’ was the same as falling behind in military capability and technical prowess, as well as lagging in the competition for the ‘hearts and minds’ of other nations.

Thus the courage and capability displayed by America’s first astronauts accounted for far more than the successful achievement of the goals of a particular mission. The flights required a heroism far-sighted enough to understand the larger importance of one’s own actions, as well as the concentration necessary to focus on every detail necessary to the success of each objective along the way.

John Glenn enters the Friendship 7 Mercury spacecraft prior to his landmark flight as
the first American to orbit the Earth. Photo courtesy of NASA (www.nasaimages.org).

In the particular case of John Glenn, the decency and patriotism at the heart of his upbringing and his personality were ample resources for his success as an astronaut, and his military training and piloting skills equipped him well for flying the other-worldly Mercury “space capsule.” Further supported by the nation’s foremost engineering minds at NASA, he could reasonably expect his landmark flight aboard Friendship 7 to proceed as planned...

And yet an unexpected drama still cropped up during the flight, when an instrument reading from the spacecraft -- then in the midst of its second orbit -- indicated that the lifesaving heat shield at the bottom of the capsule, which was vital to protecting the astronaut and the vehicle during the reentry stage of the flight -- had somehow come loose.

The unexpected tension -- and ultimate triumphant -- of John Glenn’s landmark spaceflight on February 20, 1962 is covered in detail in “Five Minutes in Space -- Friendship 7: A Flicker in Orbit.”

It was perhaps a fitting metaphor that the drama that elevated NASA’s carefully planned first orbital flight into a worrisome ordeal would ultimately prove as passing as the faulty instrument reading that gave rise to it in the first place. Memories of that wintry day would still, some five decades later, be adorned with images of the handsome, smiling space pilot, celebrated by his grateful fellow citizens with presidential acclaim and a joyful parade in the nation’s signature city.

John Glenn would triumph, as the courageous astronaut in Friendship 7; the dedicated senator from Ohio for a quarter century; and again as the oldest individual to fly in space, when he flew aboard the STS-95 flight of the space shuttle Discovery in 1998.

© 2012 Patrick J. Walsh

Five Minutes in Space: One Year Online

The Apollo 1 crew (l to r): Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee

photo courtesy of NASA • www.nasaimages.org

The new episode of my video series "Five Minutes in Space," which I've just posted today, marks the start of the series' second year.

This installment, "Apollo 1: The First Team," recalls the tragic loss of the first Apollo crew, who perished when a fire broke out in their spacecraft during a test on January 27, 1967. Rather than dwell on the grim details of the accident, I've focused on the lives and legacy of crew members Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, and their dedication to the ideals of service to others and exploration of the unknown.


This episode also features snippets of two of my musical compositions: the FMS theme, "Stomp It," which appears at the start and end of every episode; and for the first time, a few brief clips from "Landing at Noctis Labyrinthus," which I've only previously used once, in an ad for my book Spaceflight: A Historical Encyclopedia.

Five Minutes in Space #13 - Apollo 1: The First Team

is available now at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXFEX6QztGU

Echoes Among the Stars Released as a Kindle eBook

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - Echoes Among the Stars, the classic history of the U.S. Space Program by Patrick J. Walsh, has been released in an eBook edition for the Kindle eBook reader from Amazon.

First published by M.E. Sharpe Inc. (Armonk, NY) in 2000, Echoes Among the Stars has previously had two hardcover printings and a paperback edition. It has been widely praised for the beauty of its accounts of pivotal moments in the development of the U.S. space program, and Apollo 11 Astronaut Buzz Aldrin has praised Echoes as “one of the best books on the space program.”

Patrick J. Walsh is an author and journalist from Peekskill, New York. His published work includes the three volume Spaceflight: A Historical Encyclopedia (2010, ABC-CLIO Inc.), and he is producer of the online video documentary series “Five Minutes in Space.” He has published hundreds of articles and authored multiple columns for a wide variety of publications since embarking on his full-time writing career in the mid-1990s, and has extensively covered the electronics industry, state and local government, and music and the arts.

M.E. Sharpe Inc. is an award-winning publisher of reference books, textbooks, general interest books, and journals.

--- end ---

Read the story, watch the video: FMS #10 - Owen & Richard Garriott

This month's episode of my web documentary series "Five Minutes in Space" details the experiences of Owen and Richard Garriott, a father and son who share the distinction of having each flown in space. The widely divergent paths they followed into the heavens epitomize the nature of space exploration in their respective eras, and the way in which the stars aligned for them to each make their way forward is truly thought-provoking.

Here's the text; the video is available at my YouTube channel,  www.youtube.com/patwalshvideo

Five Minutes in Space: Episode 10 (10/01/11) - Owen & Richard Garriott

by Patrick J. Walsh

Launched on a journey across time and space, tethered to the glories of the past by a link as strong as a family bond, and advancing a generation’s perspective on the possibilities of space travel, Richard Garriott left the Earth in Soyuz TMA-13 on October 12, 2008, to fly to the International Space Station.

Three and a half decades earlier, his father Owen Garriott -- a scientist astronaut assigned to NASA’s Skylab program -- made the same trip into the heavens, his adventure shaped so differently by the circumstances of that long ago time, so different in so many details from the world as it is today.

Emblematic of his generation, Richard Garriott drew upon his interests and skills from a young age to grow a brilliantly successful career as a video game designer, programmer and developer. It was his success as an entrepreneur that ultimately enabled him to purchase the right to fly in space, as a tourist in the earliest days of this new era of commercial spaceflight.

For his father Owen, the way into space was no less the result of brilliance, and no less subject to the restless sprawl of history.

Augmenting the skills he gained while earning his doctorate in engineering, Owen Garriott was trained as a jet pilot by the U.S. Air Force and served as an electronics officer in the U.S. Navy -- all of which led to his being chosen by NASA for training as a scientist astronaut.

Some measure of the breadth of the journey on which each of the Garriotts, father and son, embarked, can perhaps be best measured by a brief consideration of the world into which each was born -- Owen in 1930, Richard in 1961.

The dream of flying in space, let alone living at an orbital outpost like Skylab for two months, as Owen Garriott did in the summer of 1973, was still very much a dream at the start of the 1930s. And flying into space in a rocket ship shaped liked a plane, which would then return to Earth like a commuter shuttle flight on a short hop from city to city, was mere science fiction in 1930 -- even though it would be entirely real by November of 1983, when Owen Garriott launched aboard his second space mission, STS-9, on the space shuttle Columbia.

Similarly, when Richard Garriott began his life’s journey, on July 4, 1961, there had been only two human beings launched into space, and their flights were the essential expression of a world conflict, writ large in a titanic struggle of ideology and technocratic competition. At that moment, the thought of an individual citizen flying in space by virtue of his or her purchasing a ticket -- even at the highest price conceivable at the time -- was as remote as the idea of a gifted computerist building his fame and fortune by creating something known as a “computer game” -- let alone the sort of art and invention that are at the heart of the immersive, intense experience afforded by the best modern gaming titles.

In the course of brief decades, the world would change. The brilliant scientist elder Garriott would serve at Skylab when he was just 43 years old; his son, the wunderkind computer programmer and new age businessman, would find his way to the ISS at 47.

Launched on a journey across time and space, on a trip so few before them had known, Owen and Richard Garriott each pointed the way toward a day when those who wish it will find new opportunities to forge memories of their own five minutes in space.

© 2011 Patrick J. Walsh

My own media

In the interest of disclosure (and maybe promotion :) I just wanted to let everyone know about my own recent media contributions. First, there's my latest book, the three volume Spaceflight: A Historical Encyclopedia, which was published in 2010 by ABC-Clio Inc. (under their Greenwood Press imprint).

Most recently, I've been posting a series of very short documentaries about the history of space exploration at my YouTube channel, PatWalshVideo (www.youtube.com/patwalshvideo).

I welcome comments on either of these projects, or on any of my work. Thanks for reading!